High-Tech Communicator

Buyer Personas Part 8—Challenges Marketers Face in Adopting Personas

Several months ago, I posted some questions on various LinkedIn Groups about marketers’ experiences using buyer personas. Some of the most interesting feedback was “war stories” on what can go wrong with producing buyer personas.

Here are some of these marketer’s comments.

Reasons Why Marketers Have Trouble Implementing Personas

Difficulty in obtaining buy-in

• “I’ve used personas in two technology start-ups. One ‘got it.’ They put in the time and effort to create buyer personas and use them in their marketing and sales programs. But in the other company, most of management and field support did not put in enough time and effort to make good buyer personas and to use them effectively.”
• “I’ve found organizational resistance and apathy to using this approach.”

Lack of understanding of what they are and how to build them

• According to Adele Ravella,  “Although there is increasing awareness of buyer personas , in the greater scheme of things, buyer personas are not a well understood concept. And among people who do know what a persona is, most don’t know how to build or use them.”
• “In all honesty, I can’t get inside the head of my B2B buyers.”
• “Organizations massively overcomplicate the process.”
• “We find that personas are frequently too product specific, as though someone in the company believed they should write personas, but they merely produced product scarecrows—that is, product stories dressed up in the clothing of a persona. This is understandable because product marketing people are often ‘forced’ to create them. But without the imprint of real customers, they have no power to make marketing more customer centric.”

In sum, buyer personas have great potential, but marketers continue to face roadblocks in successfully implementing them in their organizations.

What have your road blocks been in implementing buyer personas in your organization?  What tips do you have for overcoming them?

Buyer Personas Part 7--Surprising Lessons Learned

Marketers often create campaigns based on guesswork and theories. But they often have no way of proving these theories. Creating buyer personas gives you information about what customers and prospect really think. As a result, they’re likely to present surprises, big and small.   

This post discusses three examples of unexpected information marketers have gleaned in the process of creating buyer personas that they wouldn’t have learned otherwise.  

Example 1—Marketing ERP Solutions to Healthcare Providers

Recently, I was involved in creating buyer personas describing people responsible for purchasing ERP solutions within small to mid-size healthcare provider organizations, such as group practices, nursing homes and assisted living facilities.  To create these personas, I spoke to people in various roles (physicians, CFOs, payroll and so on) at a number of customer sites, as well as sales representatives who specialize in that target market.  

Some of the things I learned from the process that I might not have considered otherwise include:   

• The people involved in the purchase process and their concerns. For example, I learned that the person responsible for purchasing ERP solutions is the CFO and the HR director. Their biggest challenge is selling the physicians that own the practice on the need for an ERP solution. Department heads in areas such as payroll and purchasing also influence the purchase and they’re concerned with whether the product features allow them to do what they need to and how easy they are to use. The technical staff also gets involved in the purchase process, but only to make sure that the ERP solution is compatible with systems they already have in house.
• The ERP vendor’s competitors in this market and why customers choose one product over another. For example, customers choose one product over another either because they’ve used one of the products previously or because they find one of the products easier to use.
• How customers use the product and the benefit they receive.  

Example 2—Marketing ERP Solutions to the Travel and Transportation Industries

Eddie Reeves, Principal of Reeves Strategy Group, spoke with me about his experience developing buyer personas in an effort to market an ERP solution to the travel and transportation industry. A few of the issues he uncovered that surprised him were:

• The travel and logistics industry was undergoing a human capital crisis. As Reeves noted, “Mid-level logistics experts that get the products we use every day delivered on time were retiring in droves. Yet almost no young people were entering the field. It was a huge business issue. As a result, we discovered that if we could talk about the technology in the context of how it mitigates that problem, we could reposition ourselves in a helpful way.”
• They also found that people in travel and transportation are likely to have a military or engineering background. That made the HR crisis more acute because those people aren’t very HR oriented.

Example 3—Selling Security Solutions to Technical Buyers

One product marketing manager I spoke with sells computer network security solutions to technical buyers. By talking to customers and prospects, who tend to be in security operations, this marketing manager learned that one of his customer’s key problems was selling solutions up the organization—for example, to the Director of Security, CIO or VP of Network Engineering. As a result, he learned he needed two personas, one for the security operations guy and the other for that person’s boss.

He also learned that buyers were looking not for products, but for solutions to problems—specifically for help complying with regulations such as PCI, FISMA and HIPAA.

The process of creating buyer personas provides real-world input that marketers would be unable to uncover otherwise.

What unexpected insights have you gained as you’ve created buyer personas?

Buyer Personas Part 6—How to Create a Buyer Persona

Where do you find the information you need to create buyer personas? What questions should you answer? These were two of my biggest questions when I first began looking into and creating buyer personas. Here’s what I found:

Information Sources

When putting together personas, marketers tend to gather information from the following sources:

·  Interviews. Interview customers, prospects, and sales reps and other individuals who communicate with customers on a daily basis

·  Publications. Read everything your buyers do. Look at publications geared toward your target segments. Pay attention to the type of language they use, how they present their information, and the topics they discuss.

·  Industry blogs. Who writes these blogs? What are they writing about?

·  Social networks and forums. What are people talking about? What challenges are they facing? What questions do they ask?

· Reports. Dig up analyst reports, news articles, and government reports pertaining to your target market segments. Find out what laws and proposed legislation affect your market.

· Companies in your market segment. Look at their websites. Read their annual reports. What are their size, structure, success, challenges?

· Conferences and seminars. What topics are offered? Who’s presenting? What are they speaking about? What word choices do they use? Talk to other participants.

· Win/loss analysis. Talk to people who’ve just chosen you and those who haven’t.

Questions

The following are some questions, developed for the Pragmatic Marketing Effective Product Marketing Seminar, that can get you started putting together your buyer personas.

· What capabilities are most important to buyers?

· What attitudes prevail among deals you win and those you lose?

· What process did the buyer follow to make the purchase decision?

· What resources did the buyer consult during the purchase process?

· What’s keeping these buyers awake at night?

· Why does this problem persist?

· What do they hope will improve after they buy a solution?

· What criteria did this user use to make a decision?

· What did they like about your product? How do they feel about your sales process and sales person? What is their experience with customer support?

· Ask about ROI. How do they think the product will save them money. What inefficient processes does the product help replace?

· How is success measured and by whom?

· What’s at risk for this individual in the purchasing process?

· What could go wrong for the buyer if the purchase is a failure?

· What has prevented this person from considering your products in the past?

· What is this person’s likely progression in their career? What other roles have they had? What do they aspire to become?

Additional Tips

The following are tips for getting the most out of your buyer persona interviews and for analyzing your results:

· Go into interviews with an open mind. If you have preconceived notions, it will shape your questions and you may miss the real point.

· Frame questions in different ways. People may answer the same question differently if you ask it in different ways.

· List pain points in priority order according to their importance to target audiences. Include exact quotes that reflect the exact words that buyers use. This will help you see patterns that you can use to create your buyer profile.

· Use an iterative approach. According to one marketer, “Too many marketers use a one-size fits all approach to the development of buyer personas. And once the persona is complete, they use it as is for all time. The best profiles I’ve developed use a phased development strategy. I start with a profile based on general assumptions of the title or role, review existing customer data based on recent wins to confirm or refine my perceptions, and then talk with customers/prospects as often as possible in either formal or informal venues. Personas should be continually refined based on new data.”

My next post in this series will describe real-life experiences creating buyer personas.

What tips can you share as you’ve produced buyer personas?

Buyer Personas Part 5--Reader Survey Results

 

Last spring, we conducted a survey of the readers of this blog to learn about their use of buyer personas and how that use (or lack thereof) impacts their marketing materials.  Respondents primarily sold enterprise software with a small number selling hardware and software for small businesses.   

A Summary of the Results

Overall, we found that most companies surveyed do some research into their markets and use that information to produce their collateral. However, only about half go so far as to create in-depth buyer personas. Those that do create buyer personas primarily focus on interviewing existing customers—and, to a lesser extent, on prospective customers who did not make purchases from them.  When they do interview customers, they’re primarily interested in learning their pain points and business drivers.

The results indicate that there is clearly room for improvement. While users find that the content companies create based on their knowledge of customers and prospects is satisfactory, only about a third of companies are highly satisfied and nearly one quarter are not satisfied. Similarly, only half of the sales people find that the content marketing produces for them is very relevant. It is likely that by spending more time and producing more comprehensive buyer personas, marketers would have more information they could use to produce more relevant marketing materials.

Detailed Findings

Here are our findings.

1.    Use of Targeting: Target market is widely used by software and hardware vendors. Most respondents use several methods to target customers, which is why our results add up to more than 100%. Seventy percent of respondents target customers by role, 60% by industry, and 50% with buyer personas.  

2.    Information Gathering Techniques: The preferred method to obtain information was by interviewing customers; 80% cited interviewing customers as extremely important. Prospects were also an important source of information; 60% of respondents said interviewing prospects was extremely important.  Methods of obtaining information such as interviewing sales reps, attending trade shows, and monitoring social media, while important, were not primary tools for learning about target customers.

3.    Types of information gathered:  Respondents were most interested in gathering the following information:  

· The number one interest was learning about customer pain points (60% very important, 40% important).

· Business drivers were the second most important area of concern (50 % very important, 50% important).

· Win/loss analysis was marginally less important (50% very important, 10% important, 40% somewhat important).

· This information gathering was followed in importance by “what customers/prospects think of and like about my products”, “ROI from my product”, “what customers think of my competitors features/products” and  “the IT buying process.”

4.    How Information is Used: The vast majority (70%) used this research when creating marketing communications materials.

5.    Measuring results. Only 44.4% of respondents attempted to measure ROI improvements from using collateral.

6.    Satisfaction with the Results: Two thirds of sales reps are satisfied with existing collateral while only 13% are very satisfied and nearly one in four are not satisfied.  More than half (56%) of the sales reps find collateral only somewhat relevant; sales reps find sales collateral highly relevant 44% of the time. Similarly, marketers are very satisfied with collateral used in lead-generation or lead-nurturing campaigns one-third of the time. They’re satisfied 44% of the time. However, nearly one quarter of the time they are not satisfied with the collateral produced.

Conclusion

Clearly, the marketing collateral created today is not bad, but there’s room for improvement.  Software and hardware vendors need to improve their understanding of their customers if they wish to produce sales materials that satisfy—and even exceed—expectations. 

In my next post, I’ll talk about tips for creating personas

How do your experiences compare with the results from our survey?

 

 

 

 

 

Buyer Personas Part 4—One Measure of ROI

In my last post on buyer personas, I wrote about how marketers rarely measure the direct ROI from using buyer personas, yet still believe they achieve tremendous benefits from using them.  But just because most people don’t measure ROI, doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to measure ROI.  Pragmatic Marketing magazine presented one way of measuring ROI in its article “The ROI of Being Market Driven.”

While this article doesn’t specifically measure ROI from personas, by definition, market driven organizations get to know their customers thoroughly and act accordingly, which is exactly what marketers are trying to do when they develop buyer personas.

In this article, Pragmatic Marketing claims that their research has “validated many of the high-level, anecdotal studies that support the value of being market driven. According to their research, companies are more profitable (31% more), twice as fast at getting new products to market, and own 10-20% higher customer satisfaction levels.

When it comes to marketing, a market-driven approach provides two benefits: It improves the effectiveness of marketing and it reduces the costs of marketing programs.

Improving Marketing Effectiveness

I’ve always believed that being customer focused improves ROI in marketing by increasing the effectiveness of marketing programs and collateral. After all, if you know who you’re talking to and talk about the things that concern them most, it makes sense that people are more likely to listen to what you have to say—rather than tuning you out.

Pragmatic Marketing’s research validates that commonly held viewpoint. What’s most interesting is the magnitude of the improvement. People don’t pay attention slightly more with a market driven approach, they really perk up and pay attention.

As the article notes, “In our industry, most vendors assume that it takes 5 to 8 marketing impressions to a prospective customer to establish product awareness. We found that market-driven collateral and tools that focus on solving market problems for our prospective customers generate leads in no more than 2 to 3 ‘touches,’ improving ROI by over 100%.”

Reduce Marketing Program Costs

The other benefit of a market-driven approach that uses buyer personas is that it gives you a much better idea of what programs will be effective and which won’t—so you can ditch programs that are unlikely to work for your target market.

I’ve seen really powerful examples of this in my own blog. My most popular posts by far have been written as answers to questions that I’ve heard time and time again from my target market. Similarly, as part of the process of creating buyer personas, you learn the key concerns that keep your target market up at night and are able to target your campaigns accordingly, weeding out any extraneous information that’s not 100% focused on the market, persona and the persona’s problems.

Again, what’s interesting about Pragmatic Marketing’s findings is the magnitude of the savings. By carefully considering the concerns of your buyer personas and eliminating information and programs that don’t address those concerns 100%, Pragmatic Marketing says companies can improve ROI by up to 50%, eliminating entire campaigns and significantly increasing sales productivity.

 

How does your experience compare to these findings from Pragmatic Marketing?  

 

Buyer Personas Part 3—There’s No ROI from Buyer Personas, but Benefits are Legion

Marketers that use buyer personas take it as an article of faith that buyer personas help you produce better marketing. But can you measure ROI from using buyer personas?    

I emailed this question to Adele Ravella, one of the leading proponents of buyer personas. She relied, “Buyer personas are only an internal tool to help the marketing team better assess their segmentation, messaging and program strategies.  Almost no one measures the effectiveness of these strategies, much less the causal effect of the tools that informed the strategies. Bottom line, I wouldn’t take an ROI approach. It is simply logical that the company needs to understand its buyers and having a tool to consolidate that understanding makes sense.”

If you can’t quantify the benefits of buyer personas, you should at least be able to specify qualitative benefits. So I poked around online and also asked marketers who use buyer personas what real world benefits they achieved from using them. Here’s what people said.

More Urgent On-Target Messaging  

· “Basing your work on buyer personas prevents you from sitting on your butt in your comfortable office just making stuff up, which is the cause of most ineffective marketing. By truly understanding the market problems that your products and services solve for your buyer personas, you transform your marketing from mere product-specific, ego-centric gobbledygook that only you understand and care about into valuable information people are eager to consume and that they use to make the choice to do business with your organization.”  

· “Not everyone thinks or behaves like you do. Personas give you a framework to have informed discussions about who your customers are, how they behave, and what they want.”

· “Buyer personas are about determining what’s keeping your prospects awake at night, helping them do their jobs better and achieve their business objectives. If you don’t take the time to learn this, your content, messaging and conversations won’t be of interest to them over the longer term of the B2B buying process.”

Focus the Organization on What Matters—the Customer

· “Product marketers from technology companies often come from product management or engineering. They’re very feature centric. They don’t spend time in the field and can’t pull themselves out of discussing features. As for sales, when they go into the field, they do feature bake-offs. Then, when they find out their competitor is already in the account and knows what their weaknesses are, they freak out. So they go back to engineering. They don’t have a perspective on what the competitive differentiators are and how to go in and sell that and what the company uniquely provides. Personals allow you to pull yourself out of this infantile feature slinging.”

Improve Planning

· “Buyer personas help us put buckets around bigger populations and develop products and go-to-market strategies that are appropriate to their needs and buying patterns. They also help take planning steps such as basic market segmentation to a much more useful level by putting them into context.”

Resolve Disputes Based on Facts, not Opinions

·  “Often marketers place a lot of emphasis on the opinions of internal resources and little time in the field. There ends up being a lot of conjecture and internal resources bicker. However, opinions are interesting but irrelevant. The customer is king. When you can go to management and say, ‘This is what so-and-so is saying,’ it’s not my opinion and they can’t argue with that. It allows you to make fact-based versus conjecture-based decisions and eliminates politics.”

Improves Communication within the Marketing Team

·  “The value of using personas in our organization is from simplifying internal communications. Using buyer personas gives the business-facing marketers a clear way of communicating details about the people in their markets to our internal agency. Every request brief is supposed to reference a buyer persona so that people who develop communications know who they’re communicating to.”  

Better Customer Conversations

·  “We measured the return from using buyer personas by looking at the number of customer conversations. We looked at measures of how many people came to dinner at trade shows; how many conversations; how many people came to the booth; how many stayed more than five minutes; how the sales reps ranked the conversations. After using buyer personas, we found that the quality and quantity of conversations the team was engaging in were up substantially (by their own reporting).”

Help Allocate Limited Resources

· “We had an extremely limited marketing budget and could only do a few things. We needed the biggest bang for our marketing buck. So we created buyer personas for the different lines of our business. After we honed our buyer personas, we were able to figure out that the traditional marketing approaches we were using were a waste of money. We found that going to the big IT expos and spending a lot of money on trade show booths didn’t buy us a lot. It made more sense to hone in on subsegments of our markets and go to smaller more targeted shows.”

Help with Marketing Automation Tools

· “Buyer personas are critical for the creation of any marketing content and campaigns that deliver conversations, especially for use with marketing automation tools (Marketo, MarketBright) and their industry-specific buying tracks

 While most marketers don't measure ROI from the use of buyer personas, my next post will talk about one way you can measure quantitative results.

What benefits has your company achieved from your use of buyer personas?

Buyer Personas Part 2—What are Buyer Personas and Who Isn’t Using Them?

In my last blog post, I briefly introduced the concept of personas and how they help you better understand your customers. Before I go into more detail about my research into how marketers are using them, I want to provide a more detailed definition of buyer personas and present some research findings on who is—and isn’t—using them.

Buyer Persona Definitions

Like the proverbial blind man describing the elephant, different people emphasize different aspects of buyer personas. Here are some definitions:

· Buyer personas are profiles or biographies on the distinct market segments you plan to reach and influence.

· Unlike a target market that groups customers with a similar problem, the buyer persona goes a level deeper and tries to group customers within a target market by a particular set of demographics and needs.

· Buyer personas include the psychographics of the buyer, including lifestyle, interests and personality.

· Buyer personas should identify any physical and emotional characteristics within that group. These might include buying habits or needs based on factors such as gender, education, income, marital status, occupation, employment status. Emotional characteristics might include fears, desires and values. These emotional characteristics, while difficult to uncover, can provide powerful indicators on how to best deliver your message.

· According to Adele Revella, who tirelessly promotes the concept of buyer personas in her Buyer Persona blog, the most important insight a buyer persona can provide is the answer to the question—what prevents this type of buyer from choosing us? 

While the specifics of what to include in a buyer persona may vary, marketers agree that they must be based on interviews with and observations of real customers (who have bought your product) and prospects within your target market (who have not).

Who’s Using Buyer Personas—Or Not

While B2B marketers are increasingly familiar with buyer personas, the majority are still not using them. Bulldog Solutions’ Executive Benchmark Assessment surveyed 250 B2B marketers between June 2009 and January 2010. The report found that less than half (46%) had developed buyer personas.

Why is this a Problem?

You can’t create relevant content if you don’t know who you’re talking to and what matters to them. Not developing buyer personas makes it difficult to develop relevant content. This observation is born out by research. According to IDG Communications, buyers only find relevant content 42% of the time. And this lack of relevant content reduces the vendor’s chance of closing the sale by 45%.

Vendors that take heed and develop relevant content reap the rewards. Research from Genius.com and DemandGenReport, Inside the Mind of the B2B Buyer, found that almost 95% of recent buyers said the solution provider they chose provided them with ample content to help navigate through each stage of the buying process. And 66% of respondents indicated that consistent and relevant communication provided by both the sales and marketing organizations was a key influence in choosing that company as their solution provider.

So if you want to speak with your potential customers in a manner that is most likely to influence them, start by getting to know them better by creating buyer personas.  

Next time I’ll talk about benefits and ROI from using buyer personas.

How does your organization define buyer personas?

Buyer Personas Part 1—Lessons from a Cultural Anthropologist

As my daughter nears college, my husband and I have been trying to help her define her interests. To that end, the three of us visited a professor of cultural anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. We asked her what cultural anthropologists do in the field and what they hope to achieve. As the professor spoke, it occurred to me that as B2B marketers introduce products to market, we would do well to apply some cultural anthropology techniques for learning about our customers so that we can better communicate with them.

Notes from the Field

Granted, we hardly became experts in cultural anthropology based on a one hour conversation geared to the level of a high school freshman. Still, the professor offered valuable insights.

For example, one of the primary research techniques for a cultural anthropologist is immersion in the subject’s culture. For example, this professor described living with a family in the subject culture and participating in their daily lives, being as helpful as possible, all the while quietly observing and taking notes on the activities people perform and asking questions.

She noted that when you show genuine interest in another’s culture, people are happy to let you in and tell you about their lives.

Additional ways to learn about the culture are to learn about the culture’s arts—the music, film, books, drawings and paintings—and analyze what they can tell you about the people’s concerns.

Ultimately, one of the most important goals for a cultural anthropologist is to promote better understanding and dialog among cultures. Only by carefully observing someone’s culture can you truly understand where they’re coming from and how to communicate effectively with them. And only by effective communication can you work together to solve common challenges.

How this Relates to Marketing

Sometimes you are your market. For example, Apple has been wildly successful marketing to young, hip, techno-savvy types because…well…that’s who designs their products. Apple designs its products to stretch the envelope beyond what its audience can imagine that it wants (e.g. its audience never said “I want an iPod,” before one was invented) but Apple gets away with the risky business of leading a market because they truly understand their audience.

But what if you’re a young dude and your audience is middle aged women? Or what if you’d like to launch your product in another country, for example, in an emerging market like China or Latin America?

The only way to develop products and produce effective marketing communications about those products is to take a page from the cultural anthropologists’ book and learn as much as you can about where your customers are coming from. What are their daily lives like? What daily tasks must they perform? What are their goals? What do they care about?  What are their challenges?  

Only by understanding where your audience is coming from can you begin to understand the best way to communicate with them. And only through effective communication can you successfully market your products to them.

The State of Customer Understanding Today—Buyer Personas

Are technology companies doing this today? People are moving in that direction.

While technology companies continue to target customers based on segments, such as geography, industry or role in the company, today marketers are taking their efforts a step further by developing “buyer personas.” A buyer persona is a detailed profile of a target buyer. Usually, it’s a description of a fictionalized buyer—people often refer to the archetypal buyer—based on composite attributes of real customers unearthed in the course of anthropological-like research that includes online research, interviews with customers, prospects, sales reps and partners, surveys, even observations of people’s online behavior.

The persona may include information such as gender, age, marital status, number of children. It certainly includes information about their goals, what keeps them up at night, how they purchase IT products, and how they prefer to receive information.

As a writer, I firmly believe that the only way technology companies can truly communicate with their customers in a way that customers understand is to get to know them as well as possible. While I’ve worked with some clients to define personas, I wanted to learn more about best practices so I started doing research and asking other marketers about how they’re creating and using personas.  

In the next few posts, I’ll talk about what I found.  Topics I will cover include:

· Buyer persona FAQs

· The benefits real marketers have achieved from using personas

· Buyer persona survey results

· Tips for producing personas, including places to find information and questions to ask

· An example of how I produced a buyer persona for one of my clients

· The problems marketers face when creating buyer personas

· How marketers do—and don’t—measure their ROI from producing personas

What efforts have your firm undertaken to learn more about customers?

What’s the Right Length for a White Paper?

Over the past couple of years, many technology companies have begun requesting shorter white papers. While a typical thought leadership white paper might have once been 10-12 pages, today’s technology marketers are increasingly requesting 5-8 pages. This comes from the need to meet tight budgets and out of a belief that people are less interested than ever in devoting the time to reading longer documents.

My view is that the length of paper should depend on the topic and the audience. Here are some observations:

·     Length is not the issue as much as interest. Readers will read content if they’re interested in it, regardless of length. And some topics require more space than others. Often, technical white papers require more space than those geared to a general business audience.

·     Readability is key. To keep readers interested in a paper of any length, you need to make the content compelling. Obviously, content is only compelling if it addresses a problem or topic that’s relevant to the reader. That said, the content needs to be written clearly so readers can easily understand what you mean. Text also needs to be broken up so readers can easily scan each section to determine whether or not they’re interested in that section.

·     Some audiences have different tolerances for reading. As a general rule, technical audiences are more willing to pour through longer, detailed documents. Salespeople always hate text; they often prefer short, bulleted lists. Executives just want to see the high level points that focus on return on investment.

·      The tighter the focus, the shorter the document. One way to effectively create shorter papers is to tightly focus the paper. For example, one client created several white papers that answered certain questions that the salespeople kept getting from customers such as how does your product support RFID. Another paper discussed how the client supported SAS 70 Part II. Because the paper we created was so tightly focused, it was easy to create a very short document.

Overall, no matter how short, a white paper remains a significant investment. You don’t want to short change that message by leaving out valuable content that could help drive the point home, on the other hand, every word needs to support the important messages.

 

What are your thoughts about the correct length for white papers?